1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for computing distances, particularly to a system and a method for computing minimum distances between two point clouds.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, with continuous improvement of computer hardware and software, computers play a major role in a point cloud processing system. The point cloud processing system generally includes: a point cloud obtaining device for obtaining point cloud of an object and inputting the point cloud to a computer; a computer for executing software to process the point cloud, such as Computer Aided Verification (CAV), Reverse Engineering (RE), and so on.
During processing the point cloud, different distances usually need to be computed, for example, minimum distances between two point clouds. The minimum distances between two point clouds mean a gather of a distance between each point of a first point cloud and a nearest point (which is nearest to the point of the first point cloud) of a second point cloud. In order to compute the minimum distances between two point clouds, a conventional method is used. The conventional method can be described as: computing distances between each point in the first point cloud and each point in the second point cloud for getting the shortest distances. Usually, a quantity of the points in the point cloud may be hundreds of thousands, several million, even several billion. Thus, such conventional method of computing the minimum distances between two point clouds is becoming a severe inefficiency problem resulting in difficult, complex and time-consuming.
What is needed, therefore, is a method for computing the distances between two point clouds, which is capable of computing the minimum distances between two point clouds quickly and conveniently.